The Front Page

Hildy Johnson is leaving the paper to marry, a condemned man escapes from the jail across the yard and hides in the press-room rolltop desk, and Walter Burns makes sure Hildy does not leave. Lewis Milestone keeps the camera moving around the poker table in a year when most talkies sat still, and the last line survives with the profanity covered by the ring of a typewriter bell. Pat O'Brien and Adolphe Menjou, in the first of four screen versions of the Hecht and MacArthur play. Several cuts exist; the Academy Film Archive restoration from Howard Hughes's own print is the one to see. Caddo for United Artists, 1931.